anity as I am when in New York."

"I was thinking only this morning," Dora answered, "how very few
wretched people I had met in the streets."

"Wait a bit; see if in ten minutes from this time you are not almost led
to conclude that there is nothing left in this world but wretchedness
and filth and abomination."

They turned suddenly around the corner of a pleasant street, and as if
they were among the shifting scenes of a panorama, the entire foreground
had changed. Wretchedness! that word no more described the horrors of
their surroundings than could any other that came to Dora's mind. The
scene beggared description. "Swarms of horrors!" she called them in
speaking of the people afterward. Just now she clung silent and half
frightened to her husband's arm. He, too, became silent, and appeared
occupied solely in guarding his wife and shielding her from disagreeable
collisions. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation of delight:

"Look, Dora! this is the building of which I have read but have never
seen. I have not had time to come so far down before this. Can you
imagine a more delightful oasis in this desert of filth and pollution?"

There it stood, the great, _clean_, splendid building! towering above
its vile and rickety neighbors. And in bright, clear letters, that
seemed to Theodore to be written in diamonds, gleamed the name; far down
the street it caught the eye, "Home for Little Wanderers."

Dora looked and smiled and caught her breath, and then the tears dropped
one by one on her husband's sleeve. It almost seemed like the voice of
an angel speaking to the world from out of that moral darkness.

"Oh, if I had known that day when I was in New York of such a spot as
this in all the world, what a different world it would have looked to
me. The idea that there could be a home _anywhere_ in all the universe,
or beyond it, for such as I had never occurred to me." Theodore spoke in
low, earnest tones, full of deep and solemn feeling.

"But, Theodore," said Dora, gently, "if you _had_ known of this home, or
any like it, and gone thither instead of to Cleveland on that day, where
would you have been now, and what would have become of me?"

Theodore smiled down on his fair young bride, and drew the hand that
rested on his arm a little closer as he answered:

"I am quite content, my darling. I am not complaining of the guiding
Hand that led me home. I have surely reason to be utterly and entirely
satisfied with my l